CHAPTER VI.

THROUGH the orchards, as his footsteps died away, there came a
shrill scream on the silence, which only the sighing of the cushats had
broken.

It was the voice of the old serving‐woman, who called on her name from the
porch.

In the old instinct, born of long obedience, she drew her self wearily
through the tangled ways of the gardens and over the threshold of the
house.

She had lost all remembrance of Flamma’s death, and of the inheritance of his
wealth. She only thought of those great and noble fruits of a man’s genius
which she had given up all to save; she only thought ceaselessly, in the
sickness of her heart, “Will he forget?—forget quite—when he is free?”

The peasant standing in the porch with arms a‐kimbo, and the lean cat rubbing
ravenous sides against her shoes, peered forth from under the rich red
leaves of the creepers that shrouded the pointed roof of the door‐way.

Her wrinkled face was full of malignity; her toothless mouth smiled; her eyes
were full of a greedy triumph. Before her was the shady, quiet, leafy
garden, with the water running clear beneath the branches; behind her was
the kitchen with its floor of tiles, its strings of food, its wood‐piled
hearth, its crucifix, and its images of saints.

She looked at the tired limbs of the creature whom she had always hated for
her beauty and her youth; at the droop of the proud head, at the pain and
the exhaustion which every line of the face and the form spoke so plainly;
at the eyes which burned so strangely as she came through the grey pure air,
and yet had such a look in them of sightlessness and stupor.

“She has been told,” thought the old serving‐woman. “She has been told, and
her heart breaks for the gold.”

The thought was sweet to her—precious with the preciousness of vengeance.

page: 376

“Come within,” she said, with a grim smile about her mouth. “I will give thee
a crust and a drink of milk. None shall say I cannot act like a Christian;
and tonight I will let thee rest here in the loft, but no longer. With the
break of day thou shalt tramp. We are Christians here.”

Folle‐Farine looked at her with blind eyes, comprehending nothing that she
spoke.

“You called me?” she asked, the old mechanical formula of servitude coming to
her lips by sheer unconscious instinct.

“Ay, I called. I would have thee to know that I am mistress here now; and I
will have no vile things gad about in the night so long as they eat of my
bread. To‐night thou shalt rest here, I say; so much will I do for sake of
thy mother, though she was a foul light o’love; when all men deemed her a
saint; but to‐morrow thou shalt tramp. Such hell‐spawn as thou art may not
lie on a bed of holy church.”

Folle‐Farine gazed at her, confused and still, not comprehending; scarcely
awake to the voice which thus adjured her; all her strength spent and
bruised, after the struggle of the temptation which had assailed her.

“You mean,” she muttered, “you mean—What would you tell me? I do not
know.”

The familiar place reeled around her. The saints and the satyrs on the carved
gables grinned on her horribly. The yellow house‐leek on the roof seemed to
her so much gold, which had a tongue, and muttered, “You prate of the soul.
I alone am the soul of the world.”

All the green, shadowy, tranquil ways grew strange to her; the earth shook
under her feet; the heavens circled around her:—and Pitchou, looking on her,
thought that she was stunned by the loss of the miser’s treasure!

She!—in whose whole burning veins there ran only one passion, in whose
crushed brain there was only one thought—“Will he forget—forget quite—when
he is free?”

The old woman stretched her head forward, and cackled out eager, hissing,
tumultuous words.

“Hast thou not heard? No? Well, see then. Some said you should be sent for,
but the priest and I said No. Neither Law nor Church count the
love‐begotten. Flamma
page: 377 died worth forty
thousand francs, set aside all his land and household things. God rest his
soul! He was a man. He forgot my faithful service, true, but
the good almoner will remember all that to me. Forty thousand francs! What a
man! And hardly a nettled boiled in oil would he eat some days together.
Where does this money go—eh, eh? Canst guess?”

“Go?”

Pitchou watched her grimly, and laughed aloud.

“Ah, ah! I know. So you dared to hope too? Oh fool! What thing did ever he
hate as he hated your shadow on the wall? The money, and the lands, and the
things—every coin, every inch, every crumb—is willed away to the Bishop, to
the holy Bishop in the town yonder, to hold for the will of God and the
glory of his kingdom. And masses will be said for his soul, daily, in the
cathedral; and the gracious almoner has as good as said that the mill shall
be let to Fraçvron, the baker, who is old and has no women to his house; and
that I shall dwell here and manage all things, and rule Fraçvron, and end my
days in the chimney corner. And I will stretch a point and let you lie in
the hay to‐night, but to‐morrow you must tramp, for the devil’s daughter and
Holy Church will scarce go to roost together.

Folle‐Farine heard her stupidly, and stupidly gazed around; she did not
understand. She had never had any other home, and, in a manner, even in the
apathy of a far greater woe, she clove to this place; to its familiarity,
and its silences, and its old woodland ways.

“Go!”—she looked down through the aisles of the boughs dreamily; in a vague
sense she felt the sharpness of desolation which repulses the creature whom
no human heart desires, and whom no human voice bids stay.

“Yes. Go; and that quickly,” said the peasant, with a sardonic grin. “I serve
the Church now. It is not for me to harbour such as thee; nor is it fit to
take the bread of the poor and the pious to feed lips as accursed as are
thine. Thou may’st lie here to‐night—I would not be over harsh—but tarry no
longer. Take a sup and a bit, and to bed. Dost hear?
”

Folle‐Farine, without a word in answer, turned on her heel and left her.

page: 378

The old woman watched her shadow pass across the threshold, and away down the
garden paths between the green lines of the clipped box, and vanish beyond
the fall of drooping fig boughs and the walls of ivy and of laurel; then
with a chuckle she poured out her hot coffee, and sat in her corner and made
her evening meal well pleased; comfort was secured her for the few years
which she had to live, and she was revenged for the loss of the sequins.

“How well it is for me that I went to mass every Saint’s day,” she thought,
foreseeing easy years and plenty under the rule of the Church and of old
deaf Françvron the baker.

Folle‐Farine mounted the wooden ladder to the hayloft which had been her
sleeping‐chamber, there took the little linen and the few other garments
which belonged to her, folded them together in her winter sheep‐skin, and
sent down the wooden steps once more, and out of the mill‐garden across the
bridge into the woods.

She had no fixed purpose even for the immediate hour; she had not even a
tangible thought for her future. She acted on sheer mechanical impulse, like
one who does sane things unconsciously, walking abroad in the trance of
sleep. That she was absolutely destitute scarcely bore any sense to her. She
had never realised that this begrudged roof and scanty fare, which Flamma
had bestowed on her, had, wretched though they were, yet been all the
difference between home and homelessness—between existence and
starvation.

She wandered on aimlessly through the woods.

She paused a moment on the river’s edge, and turned and looked back at the
mill and the house. Form where she stood, she could see its brown gables and
its peaked roof rising from masses of orchard foilage, and green garden
leaves; further round it, closed the dark belt of the deep chestnut
woods.

She looked; and great salt tears rushed into her hot eyes and blinded
them.

She had been hated by those who dwelt there, and had there known only pain,
and toil, and blows, and bitter words. And yet the place itself was dear to
her; its homely and simple look, its quiet garden ways, its dells of leafy
shadow, its bright and angry waters, its furred and feathered
page: 379 creatures that gave it life and loveliness,—these
had been her consolations often,—these, in a way, she loved.

Such as it was, her life had been bound up with it; and though often its cool
pale skies and level lands had been a prison to her, yet her heart clove to
it in this moment when she left it—for ever. She looked once at it long and
lingeringly, full in the light of the rising sun; then turned and went on
her way.

She walked slowly through the cool evening shadows, while the birds fluttered
about her head. She did not comprehend the terrible fate that had befallen
her. She did not think that it was horrible to have no canopy but the clear
sky, and no food but the grain rubbed form the ripe wheat‐ears.

The fever of conscious passion which had been born in her, and the awe of the
lonely death that she had witnessed, were on her too heavily, and with too
dreamy and delirious an absorption, to leave any room in her thoughts for
the bodily perils or the bodily privations of her fate.

Some vague expectancy of some great horror, she knew not what, was on her.
She was as in a trance, her brain was giddy, her eyes blind. Though she
walked straightly, bearing her load upon her head, on and on as through the
familiar paths, she yet had no goal, no sense of what she meant to do, or
whither she desired to go.

The people were still about, going from their work in the fields, and their
day at the town‐market, to their homesteads and huts. Every one of them cast
some word at her. For the news had spread by sunset over all the
country‐side that Flamma’s treasures were gone to holy Church.

They were spoken in idleness, but they were sharp, flouting, merciless arrows
of speech, that struck her hardly as the speakers cast them, and laughed,
and passed by her. She gave no sign that she heard, not by so much as the
quiver of a muscle or the glance of an eye; but she, nevertheless, was stung
by them to the core. For they showed her how worthless and friendless a
thing had dared to dream that she might be of service to the life of
Arslàn.

Not one of them, man or boy, but made a mock of her as they trooped by
through the purpling leaves or the tall seed‐grasses. Not one of them,
mother or maiden, that gave a gentle look at her, paused to remember that
she
page: 380 was homeless, and knew no more
where to lay her head that night than any sick hart driven from its
kind.

She met many in the soft grey and golden evening, in the fruit‐hung ways,
along the edge of the meadows; fathers with their little children running by
them, laden with plumes of night‐shade; mothers bearing their youngest born
before them on the high sheepskin saddle; young lovers talking together as
they drove the old cow to her byre; old people counting their market gains
cheerily; children paddling knee‐deep in the brooks for cresses. None of
them had a kindly glance for her;—all had a flouting word. There was not one
who offered her so much as a draught of milk; not one who wished her so much
as a brief good‐night.

“She will quit the country now; that is one good thing,” she heard many of
them say of her. And they spoke of Flamma, and praised him; saying, how pure
as myrrh in the nostrils was the death of one who feared God.

The night came on nearer; the ways grew more lonely; the calf bleating sought
its dam, the sheep folded down close together, the lights came out under the
lowly roofs; now and then from some open window in the distance there came
the sound of voices singing together; now and then there fell across her
path two shadows turning one to the other.

She only was alone.

What did she seek to do?

She paused on a little slip of moss‐green timber that crossed the water in
the open plain, and looked down at herself in the shining stream. None
desired her—none remembered her; none said to her, “Stay with us a little,
for love’s sake.”

“Surely I must be vile as they say, that all are against me!” she thought;
and she pondered wearily in her heart where her sin against them could
lie.

That brief delirious trance of joy that had come to her with the setting of
the last day’s sun, had with the sun sunk away. The visions which had
haunted her sleep under the thorn‐tree whilst the thrush sang, had been
killed under the cold and bitterness of the waking world. She wondered,
while her face grew red with shame, what she had been mad enough to dream of
in that sweet, cruel
page: 381 slumber. For him—she
felt that sooner than again look upward to his eyes she would die by a
thousand deaths.

What was she to him?—a barbarous, worthless, and unlovely thing, whose very
service was despised, whose very sacrifice was condemned.

“I would live as a leper all the days of my life, if, first, I might be fair
in his sight one hour!” she thought; and she was unconscious of horror or of
impiety in the ghastly desire, because she ahd but one religion, this—her
love.

She crossed the little bridge, and sat down to rest on the root of an old oak
on the edge of the fields of poppies.

The evening had fallen quite. There was a bright moon on the edge of the
plain. The cresset lights of the cathedral glowed through the dusk. All was
purple and grey and still. There were the scents of heavy earths and wild
thymes and the breath of grazing herds. The little hamlets were but patches
of darker shade on the soft brown shadows of the night. White sea‐mists,
curling and rising chased each other over the dim world.

She sat motionless, leaning her head upon her hand.

She could not weep, as other creatures could. The hours drew on. She had no
home to go to; but it was not for this that she sorrowed.

Afar off, a step trod down the grasses. A hawk rustled through the gloom. A
rabbit fled across the path. The boughs were put aside by a human hand;
Arslàn came out from the darkness of the woods before her.

With a sharp cry she sprang to her feet and fled, on one passionate
reasonless instinct to hide herself for ever and for ever from the only eyes
she loved.

Before her was the maze of the poppy‐fields. In the moonlight their blossom,
so gorgeous at sunset or at noon, lost all their scarlet gaud and purple
pomp, and drooped like discrowned kings stripped bare in the midnight of
calamity.

Their colourless flowers writhed and twined about her ankles. Her brown limbs
glistened in the gleam from the skies. She tightened her red girdle round
her loins and ran, as a doe runs to reach the sanctuary.

Long withes of trailing grasses, weeds that grew amongst the grasses, caught
her fleet feet and stopped her. The earth was wet with dew. A tangle of
boughs and brambles
page: 382 filled the path. For
once, her sure steps failed her. She faltered and fell.

Ere he could touch her, she rose again. The scent of the wet leaves was in
her hair. The rain‐drops glistened on her feet. The light of the stars
seemed in her burning eyes. Around her were the gleam of the night, the
scent of the flowers, the smell of the woods. On her face the moon
shone.

She was like a creature born from the freshness of dews, from the odour of
foilage, from the hues of the clouds, from the foam of the brooks, from all
things of the woods and the water. In that moment she was beautiful with the
beauty of women.

“If only she could content me!” he thought. If only he cared for the song of
the reed by the river!

But he cared nothing at all for anything that lived; and a pursuit that was
passionless of a thing that was helpless, seemed to him base; and his feet
were set on a stony and narrow road where he would not encumber his strength
with a thing of her sex, lest the burden should draw him backward one rood
on his way.

He had never loved her; he never would love her; his eyes were awake to her
beauty, indeed, and his reason owned it beyond all usual gifts of her sex.
But his senses remained cold to it: he had used it in the service of his
art, and therein had scrutinised, and pourtrayed, and debased it, until it
had lost to him all that fanciful sanctity, all that half‐mysterious charm,
which arouse the passion of love in a man to a woman.

So he let her be, and stood by her in the dusk of the night with no light in
his own eyes.

“Do not fly from me,” he said to her. “I have sought you, to ask your
forgiveness, and—”

She stood silent, her head bent; her hands were crossed upon her chest in the
posture habitual to her under any pain; her face was shrouded in the shadow;
her little bundles of clothes had dropped on the grasses, and was hidden by
them. Of Flamma’s death and of her homelessness he had heard nothing.

“I was harsh to you,” he said, gently. “I spoke, in the bitterness of my
heart, unworthily. I was stung with a great shame;—I forgot that you could
not know. Can you forgive?”

page: 383

“The madness was mine,” she muttered. “It was I, who forgot—”

Her voice was very faint, and left her lips with effort; she did not look up;
she stood bloodless, breathless, swaying to and fro, as a young tree which
has been cut through near the root sways ere it falls. She knew well what
his words would say.

“You are generous, and you shame me—indeed—thus,” he said with a certain
softness as of unwilling pain in his voice which shook its coldness and
serenity.

This greatness in her, this wondrous faithfulness to himself, this silence,
which bore all wounds from his hand, and was never broken to utter one
reproach against him, these moved him. He could not choose but see that this
nature, which he bruised and forsook, was noble beyond any common nobility
of any human thing.

“I have deserved little at your hands, and you have given me much,” he said
slowly. “I feel base and unworthy; for—I have sought you to bid you
farewell.”

She had awaited her death‐blow; she received its stroke without a sound.

She did not move, nor cry out, nor make any sign of pain, but standing there
her form curled within itself, as a withered fern curls, and all her beauty
changed like a fresh flower that is held in a flame.

She did not look at him; but waited, with her head bent, and her hands
crossed on her breast as a criminal waits for his doom.

His nerve nearly failed him; his heart nearly yielded. He had no love for
her; she was nothing to him. No more than any one of the dark, nude, savage
women who had sat to this art on the broken steps of ruined Temples of the
Sun; or the antelope‐eyed creature of desert and plain who had come before
him in the light of the East, and had passed as the shadows passed, and,
like them, were forgotten.

She was nothing to him. And yet he could not choose but think—all this mighty
love, all this majestic strength, all this superb and dreamy loveliness,
would die out here, as the evening colours had died out of the skies in the
west, none pausing even to note that they were dead.

He knew that he had but to say to her, “Come!” and
page: 384 she would go beside him, whether to shame or
ignominy, or famine or death, triumphant and rejoicing as the martyrs of old
went to the flames, which were to them the gates of paradise.

He knew that there would not be a blow his hand could deal which could make
her deem him cruel; he knew that there would be no crime which he could bid
her commit for him which would not seem to her a virtue; he knew that for
one hour of his love she would slay herself by any death he told her; he
knew that the deepest wretchedness lived through by his side would be
sweeter and more glorious than any kingdom of the world or heaven. And he
knew well that to no man is it given to be loved twice with such love as
this.

Yet,—he loved not her; and he was, therefore, strong, and he drove the
death‐stroke home, with pity, with compassion, with gentleness, yet surely
home—to the heart.

“A stranger came to me an hour or more ago,” he said to her; and it seemed
even to him as though he slew a life godlier and purer and stronger than his
own,—“an old man, who gave no name. I have seen his face—far away, long
ago—I am not sure. The memory is too vague. He seemed a man of knowledge,
and a man critical and keen. That study of you—the one amongst the
poppies,—you remember—took his eyes and pleased him. He bore it away with
him, and left in its stead a roll of paper money—money enough to take me
back amongst men—to set me free for a little space. Oh, child! you have
seen—this hell on earth kills me. It is a death in life. It has made me
brutal to you sometimes; sometimes I must hurt something, or go mad.”

She was silent; her attitude had not changed, but all her loveliness was like
one of the poppies that his foot had trodden on, discoloured, broken,
ruined. She stood as though changed to a statue of bronze.

He looked on her, and knew that no creature had ever loved him as this
creature had loved. But of love he wanted nothing,—it was weariness to him;
all he desired was power amongst men.

“I have been cruel to you,” he said, suddenly. “I have stung and wounded you
often. I have dealt with your
page: 385 beauty as
with this flower under my foot. I have had no pity for you. Can you forgive
me ere I go?”

“You have no sins to me,” she made answer to him. She did not stir; nor did
the deadly calm on her face change; but her voice had a harsh metallic
sound, like the jar of a bell that is broken.

He was silent also. The coldness and the arrogance of his heart were pained
and humbled by her pardon of them. He knew that he had been pitiless to
her—with a pitilessness less excusable than that which is born of the
fierceness of passion and the idolatrous desires of the senses. Man would
have held him blameless here, because he had forborn to pluck for his own
this red and gold reed in the swamp; but he himself knew well that,
nevertheless, he had trodden its life out, and so bruised it, as he went,
that never would any wind of heaven breathe music through its shattered
grace again.

“When do you go?” she asked. Her voice had still the same harsh broken sound
in it. She did not lift the lids of her eyes; her arms were crossed upon her
breast;—all the ruins of the trampled poppy‐blossom were about her,
blood‐red as a field where men have fought and died.

He answered her, “At dawn.”

“And where?”

“To Paris. I will find fame—or a grave.”

A long silence fell between them.

The church chimes, far away in the darkness, tolled the ninth hour. She stood
passive, colourless as the poppies were, bloodless from the thick, dull
beating of her heart. The purple shadow and the white stars swam around her.
Her heart was broken; but she gave no sign. It was her nature to suffer to
the last in silence.

He looked at her, and his own heart softened; almost he repented him.

He stretched his arms to her, and drew her into them, and kissed the
dew‐laden weight of her hair, and the curling lithe from, whence all warmth
had died, and the passionate loveliness, which was cast to him, to be folded
in his bosom or thrust away by his foot—as he chose.

“Oh, child, forgive me, and forget me,” he murmured. “I have been base to
you,—brutal, and bitter, and cold oftentimes;—yet I would have loved you, if
I could. Love
page: 386 would have been youth,
folly, oblivion; all the nearest likeness that men get of happiness on
earth. But love is dead in me, I think, otherwise—”

She burned like fire, and grew cold as ice in his embrace. Her brain reeled;
her sight was blind. She trembled as she had never done under the sharpest
throes of Flamma’s scourge.

Suddenly she cast her arms about his throat, and clung to him, and kissed him
in answer with that strange, mute, terrible passion with which the lips of
the dying kiss the warm and living face that bends above them, on which they
know they never again will rest.

Then she broke from him, and sprang into the maze of the moonlit fields, and
fled from him like a stag that bears its death‐shot in it, and knows it, and
seeks to hide itself and die unseen.

He pursued her, urged by a desire that was cruel, and a sorrow that was
tender. He had no love for her; and yet—now that he had thrown her from him
for ever—he would fain have felt those hot mute lips tremble again in their
terrible eloquence upon his own.

But he sought her in vain. The shadows of the night hid her from him.

He went back to his home alone.

“It is best so,” he said to himself.

For the life that lay before him he needed all his strength, all his
coldness, all his cruelty. And she was only a frail female thing—a reed of
the river, songless, and blown by the wind as the rest were.

He returned to his solitude, and lit his lamp, and looked on the creations
which alone he loved.

“They shall live,—or I will die,” he said in his own heart. With the war to
which he went what had any amorous toy to do?

That night Hermes had no voice for him.

Else might the wise god had said, “Many reeds grow together by the river, and
men tread them at will, and none are the worse. But in one reed of a million
song is hidden; and when a man carelessly breaks that reed in twain, he may
miss its music often and long,—yea, all the years of his life.”